Lesson Transcript

Instructor: Erica Cummings

Erica teaches college Humanities, Literature, and Writing classes and has a Master's degree in
Humanities.

In this lesson we will explore Dante's epic poem, The Divine Comedy (circa 1308), in which the
character Dante travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.

Introduction
Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy is a famous Medieval Italian epic poem depicting the
realms of the afterlife. Dante (who was born in 1265) wrote The Divine Comedy somewhere
between 1308 and his death in 1321, while he was in exile from his hometown of Florence, Italy,
which had been enduring civil war.

The Divine Comedy is divided into three separate volumes, each containing 33 cantos (or
chapters). These volumes are Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

Dante is both the author and the central character of this trilogy. He travels through all of Hell,
Purgatory, and Heaven to make his way back to God, meeting several characters from history
and literature on his way.

Fresco of Dante and The Divine Comedy, by Domenico di

Michelino, 1465

Inferno
As an exile, the poet Dante felt rather lost in his life; so, at the beginning of Inferno, the
character Dante is likewise lost both physically and spiritually. The ancient Roman poet Virgil (a
hero of Dante's) appears in the poem to guide Dante through Hell in an effort to save Dante's
soul. Hell exists in the middle of the Earth and is made up of nine circles.

The sinners in Hell have never repented while on Earth. They suffer the consequences of the
sins they committed during life, which are turned back on them, a concept called contrapasso.
For example, canto 20 depicts circle eight, where sorcerers who used dark magic to see forward
into the future now have their heads painfully turned backwards for all eternity.

Hell is structured like an upside down cone, with each descending circle becoming smaller and
containing more depraved souls and more intense suffering. Right outside the gates of Hell are
those who neither accepted nor rejected God.

Within the gates of Hell, the first circle holds the unbaptized and the pagans born before Christ
(such as Plato, Aristotle, and Virgil himself). The other circles are defined by the major sin
committed by those condemned to that circle: lust (circle two), gluttony (circle three), greed
(circle four), and wrath and depression (circle five). The final circles make up the infernal city
called Dis, with circle six containing heretics, circle seven containing those who committed
violence, circle 8 containing deceivers, and circle nine containing those who betrayed trust. At
the deepest region of circle nine, a three-faced Satan, stuck in a frozen lake, chews on the worst
betrayers of all time: Judas (who betrayed Jesus), and Brutus and Cassius (both of whom
betrayed Julius Ceasar).

1890 engraving by Gustave Dore of Canto 34 depicting Satan

frozen in Hell

Purgatorio
After the harrowing experience in Hell, Dante and Virgil climb out and enter Purgatory, where
penitent souls endure punishment in order to fully purge themselves of sin before entering
Heaven. Purgatory is shaped like a mountain and is divided into seven different levels,
associated with the seven deadly sins of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, covetousness, gluttony, and
lust.

Contrapasso still exists to some extent; for example, those who struggled with the flames of lust
on Earth literally endure a purging fire in Purgatory. But, unlike the souls in Hell, these souls
embrace their punishment because it is making them holy. They sing and praise God in the
midst of their punishment, and implore Dante to ask people on Earth to pray for their souls.
Also unlike the souls in Hell, they are free to move between the seven levels as they purify
themselves. Beyond the seventh level at the top of the mountain is the earthly paradise of
Eden, where Virgil disappears and is replaced by Dante's next guide.
Paradiso
As a pagan, Virgil cannot enter Heaven, so he is replaced by the next guide, Beatrice, who takes
Dante from Purgatory to Heaven. Beatrice was Dante's real-life love interest and muse for
much of his poetry, so it is fitting that she acts as Dante's guide to the divine. She also seems to
be the main agent of his salvation here, so critics have long noted how Beatrice acts as a sort of
Christ figure for Dante. At

At a Glance
In this epic poem, Dante's alter ego, the Pilgrim, travels through Hell and Purgatory to reach
Heaven. His journey is meant to impress upon readers the consequences of sin and the glories of
Heaven.

 In the first section, commonly known as Dante's Inferno, the spirit of Roman poet Virgil
leads Dante's alter ego, the "Pilgrim," through the circles of Hell, where they witness
the horrible punishments that sinners have brought upon themselves.

 In the second section, Purgatory, Pilgrim meets the souls of those waiting to ascend into
Heaven. There, the souls of the saved make penance for their sins, of which they must
be cleansed before they can go to Heaven.

 In the third section, Pilgrim reaches Heaven. On the way there, he sails through space and
sees the planets, which are inhabited by saints. Upon witnessing the majesty of God in
his true glory, Pilgrim returns to Earth to write this very poem.

Summary
(LITERARY ESSENTIALS: CHRISTIAN FICTION AND NONFICTION)

Dante’s The Divine Comedy is the beginning of Italian literature and the single most significant
work of the Middle Ages because its allegory emphasizes the importance of salvation and divine
love in a work that is inclusive and tightly structured. It is so thoroughly infused with Christian
ethics that any overview has to touch on major Christian themes, beginning with the plot being
set during Easter week 1300.
The work is a complex narrative with many allusions to biblical stories, classical myths, history,
and contemporary politics; however, the plot’s symbolism provides clarity in that it celebrates
the ideal of universalism, where everything has its place in God’s world, and its ultimate goal of
salvation triumphs over the contemporary reality of the power struggle between worldly and
religious leaders.

The structure of the entire work, as well as of its parts, is symbolic of the story it tells, as the use
of numbers shows. The number 3 (symbolic of the Trinity: God as the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Ghost) and the number 10 (the “perfect” number: 3 × 3 + 1) are the most conspicuous
examples. The Divine Comedy has three “cantiche,” or parts (Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven). Each
cantica has thirty-three cantos, or songs, with the exception of the first cantica, which has thirty-
four cantos, adding up to a total of one hundred (the perfect number squared: 10 × 10). Each
canto is written in terza rima, that is, in tercets that rhyme in an interlocking manner.

The first canto of Inferno, is considered to be an introduction to the whole work (making the
structure even more symmetric: 1 + 33 + 33 + 33 = 100) because all three parts of The Divine
Comedy are present in the first canto’s symbolic landscape. Dante finds himself lost in a dark
forest. Looking for orientation, he decides to hike up a mountain, whose sunlit top represents
Purgatory, while the sky and the sun represent Heaven. However, Dante’s path is blocked by
three animals on the mountain’s slope: a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf, which represent the
three main types of sin that correspond to the three main divisions of Hell.

The spirit of Virgil appears and promises to get Dante to salvation the long way: through Hell,
Purgatory, and Heaven. Dante’s doubts are assuaged because Virgil has been sent by three
heavenly ladies (the Virgin Mary, Saint Lucy, and Beatrice); in the combination of human reason
with divine grace, Dante’s salvation may yet be achieved. After they enter Hell in the third canto,
Dante learns through conversations with Virgil and individual souls that each sin is punished
according to its severity, systematically going from the lighter sins of incontinence (giving in to
one’s desires) to the more severe sins of violence (actively willing evil) and fraud (adding
malice). Hell, which is presented as a huge funnel-shaped underground cave, extends in ever-
smaller and more-constricting circles to the middle of the earth; there, in the pit of hell, sits Satan
himself, forever stuck frozen in the ice of the lake Cocytus, chewing on the three worst human
traitors: Judas, Brutus, and Cassius.

Climbing past Satan, Dante is headed toward salvation. While all sinners in Hell will remain
there forever to suffer their horrible punishments because they did not admit their sins, souls in
Purgatory are already saved and eventually will go to Heaven because they confessed their sins
before death. Therefore, the mood has completely changed: The souls are not stuck in everlasting
isolation but learn in groups from examples of the virtue and vice that correspond to their
penance. Purgatory is presented as a huge cone-shaped mountain and the only landmass in the
southern hemisphere. Purgatory proper is organized in seven rings according to the traditional
seven deadly sins (pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust). At the top of the
mountain is earthly paradise (the Garden of Eden); this is as far as human reason can lead, so
Virgil leaves and Beatrice becomes Dante’s guide.

Cleansed of his own sins, Dante rises naturally toward Heaven. In keeping with the Ptolemaic
worldview, Heaven is organized in spheres with the earth in the center. Dante identifies ten
spheres that he relates to the so-called four pagan virtues of fortitude, justice, temperance, and
prudence in varying degrees (first to seventh Heavens), the three Christian virtues of faith, hope,
and charity (eighth Heaven), the Primum Mobile (the ninth heaven, which moves all others), and
the Empyrean (the tenth Heaven outside of time and space, where God dwells). The Empyrean as
a state of being also contains the Celestial Rose, where all blessed souls reside. The souls do not
reside in the individual heavens where Dante encounters them but are put there so that he may
more easily understand their place in the divine order. The blessed souls in Heaven form a true,
though strictly hierarchical, community that exists in an all-permeating feeling of love and bliss,
which comes from the joy and peace of being in the proper place in God’s creation. Dante evokes
in images of light what lies beyond human experience, such as the radiance of the blessed souls
and Dante’s vision of God.